Cornelius Washington made history the day he walked through the doors of the brick firehouse on Staten Island on June 16, 1957. But there was no glory in it, no celebration and no warm welcome from the band of brothers inside.

He was always an outsider, no matter how many fires he fought. Night after night, as his white colleagues joked and joshed in the kitchen, he kept a solitary watch over the fire truck, cleaning the brass, checking the rig, anything to avoid the casual banter that so easily slipped into slurs and insults.

But Mr. Washington, one of the first black firefighters on Staten Island, knew opportunity when he saw it. There was little brotherhood between blacks and whites in the New York Fire Department, but there was good pay, good benefits, a pathway to a better life. He urged the black men he knew to take the test.

His brother joined, then his two sons, Kevin and Paul. Years later, Paul Washington would spearhead the campaign for change that led the United States Justice Department to sue the overwhelmingly white department, charging that its entrance exam was biased against minority applicants.

Mr. Washington didn’t live to see it. I still remember the day in August 1999 when he was buried. In his old personnel file, he is identified by his full name and badge number, 9731. But to me, he was always just my Uncle Buddy.

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Cornelius Washington was one of the first black firefighters on Staten Island and assigned to Engine 154.CreditNicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Last week, as lawyers went back to federal court to discuss the implementation of the court settlement, I thought about my uncle and my cousins, Capt. Paul Washington and retired Lt. Kevin Washington, about fathers and sons and about pathways to the middle class.

Those routes are narrowing in this city, particularly for men and women without college degrees, who often get stuck in jobs with little hope for advancement. The Great Recession wiped out many jobs that paid good wages, and many workers have watched their salaries decline.

That’s why a job at the Fire Department is such a prize. The department offers qualified recruits who have a high school diploma and six months of full-time work experience a pay package that rises to about $100,000 after five years from about $43,000 in the first year — $100,000 a year.

Yet the 10,430-member force is about 4 percent black, city statistics show, a figure that has remained largely unchanged for decades, despite interventions reaching back to 1973. On Friday, the mayor appointed a new fire commissioner, Daniel A. Nigro, who vowed to expand diversity in the department.

Uncle Buddy was working as a bus driver on Staten Island when he passed the test. Of course, the Fire Department wasn’t paying $100,000 a year back then. But the starting salary of $4,000 was good money in the 1950s.

So when he had to report for a job-related meeting just as he was heading to Canada for his honeymoon, there was no debate about what to do.

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A fire engine at Engine 154 in Staten Island.CreditFDNY

“We drove into Canada and we drove out,” said his wife, my aunt, Thelma Washington, who said they spent only one night away before heading back.

He started at his first firehouse — Engine 69 in Harlem — in 1956. A year later, he was back home on Staten Island, where he was born and raised. It was conservative, insular and predominantly white. I can’t imagine that he had any illusions about what he would encounter at Engine 154.

Fire officials said they could not provide demographic information for the year my uncle joined the department, but in 1940 there were 50 black firefighters across the city, according to John L. Ruffins, a retired captain who has researched the history of black firefighters.

Uncle Buddy never complained. In fact, he never talked much about his experiences. It is only in recent years — more than a decade after his death — that we have learned a little about his life as the lone black fireman in his firehouse.

Retired Lt. Ralph Santinello, who transferred into Engine 154 in 1965, remembers noticing my uncle, who spent his free time with the fire truck when he wasn’t fighting brush fires or house fires with his colleagues.

Lt. Santinello, who grew up in Brooklyn, asked my Uncle Buddy why he didn’t socialize in the kitchen with the other firefighters.

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Firefighters in the 1950s, like these stationed in Harlem in 1956, were overwhelmingly white, as they are today.CreditFdny

“He said it was tough, you know, being in the back with the guys,” recalled the lieutenant, now 80, in a telephone interview from Florida. “Someone would slip with some ethnic remark or something. He said he would rather do his own thing and stay outside.”

In his 23 years in the department, Uncle Buddy and his wife visited the homes of his white colleagues only twice. But he still became an unofficial apostle for the job.

After all, the job had helped him, a black man without a college degree, to build a comfortable home; to send his daughter, Lynn, and his two sons to Catholic schools and to college; to earn a solid pension. Two nephews and a great-nephew would become firefighters, too.

This is the way of the world at the Fire Department, where countless white families have long sent fathers and sons, uncles and nephews, brothers and cousins onto the job. Uncle Buddy wanted more black men to have that chance, too.

He retired in 1979. He did not live to see the federal judge order the city to reform its hiring practices or get to meet the fire academy’s graduating class of December 2013, which was 62 percent minority.

But back in 1999, he saw his son Paul become the president of the Vulcan Society, the fraternal organization for black firefighters. Within months, Paul Washington was meeting with lawyers, setting the stage for the lawsuit against the department.

I like to think that Uncle Buddy nodded and smiled when he heard the news. He died, at the age of 72, later that year.

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A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: The Lasting Legacy of an Unwelcome Pioneer. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe